United Kingdom challenger bank Ziglu announced the launch of its peer-to-peer (P2P) payments service for both fiat and cryptocurrency on Sept. 7.
This follows hot on the heels of receiving both the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Electronic Money Institution licence, and the Fifth Money Laundering Directive (5MLD) licence last week.
Ziglu launched in June, with a vision to offer simple and secure access to any currency. The platform is undergoing continuous development and many more features are scheduled for the future.
Cointelegraph spoke to Ziglu founder and CEO Mark Hipperson about becoming fully licenced, P2P payments and future plans.
He described the licencing process as tough and time-consuming, but essential in establishing a respected position within the space.
The 5MLD regulators in particular required a lot of convincing, but were made more comfortable by the fact that Ziglu doesn’t currently allow transfers of cryptocurrency into and out of the ecosystem, thus avoiding the issue of not knowing where it has come from.
Instead, cryptocurrency can be bought within the app and transferred P2P with other users. This was to keep things simple, explains Hipperson, “although the 5MLD licence that we hold allows us to do all of the same things that a licenced exchange can, and third-party crypto transfers are certainly on the future road-map.”
Currently Ziglu supports Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ether (ETH), with XRP (XRP) being added in September, and then roughly one coin per fortnight after that as requested by customers.
The platform integrates multiple exchanges and when a customer wants to buy cryptocurrency will always search these for the best price. If this happens to be, for instance, a dollar price on Kraken, then Ziglu will convert the customer’s sterling into dollars and make the purchase instantly.
Fiat payments to and from third parties are already available.
“We aren’t a niche crypto institution, but a modern challenger bank. However, we believe that a modern challenger bank needs to enable its customers to deal in cryptocurrencies,” Hipperson said.
As Cointelegraph reported when Ziglu was first announced back in January, multi fiat currency support and a debit card which converted crypto to fiat (again at best market rates) at point of sale were promised.
Debit cards have already undergone testing and are scheduled for launch later in September. Multi-currency support for users is coming in October, although currency conversion when buying crypto is already in place.
On top of all of this, crypto held with Ziglu is fully insured up to a maximum of 50,000 pounds:
“We are one of the only companies in the world which offers a £50,000 insurance policy on crypto held with us which is quite unique.”